old and new!

I'm blogging from my old old OLD lappy today as I wait for a lovely insurance check to go towards replacing my new lappy which was stolen last Tuesday from my new home in Nashville!!! 

So there is some old stuff on here.  "TheFacebook.com" is one of my quick links on Safari.  wowza.  and going through my iTunes library is kinda like giving high-school Val a high five through time.  She was a pretty cool kid, I must say.

Also, I had to laugh at one of college senior Val's last Xanga posts (another quick link on Safari).  Here's an excerpt: 

So, today was a full work day for my thesis.  4.5 full hours of working.  i keyed out an entire scene.  hooray!  Well, close to keyed, anyway.  the program i need to time out my drawings is on the fritz.  in every single possible computer.  So, i ask the labbie what to do and she tells me to call bill, whose number i definitely do not have, and whose existence was previously completely unknown to me, or submit a complaint ticket to the helpdesk.  So, I go trudging up to the helpdesk, where they look at me like I'm crazy at the sound of my request.  So, they point me towards Bill's office (which, according to the guy, was close to ingle auditorium.  i rightly assumed he meant Webb.  engineers.), and i go, only to find that he is nowhere to be found.  I then spot a strategically placed poster advertising online helpdesk services, where i can submit a ticket to have a problem fixed.  oops.  so, now i wait for someone to read my online request and fix the problem.  chances are my class at 4 will come before a solution.

in other news, i have yet to pay real moneys for a meal this quarter, or go grocery shopping.  This is due mostly to Unzila, and largely to Matt Marsh, and partly to my Grammy.  I am eternally grateful for all three of them.

BAHAHA!!  4.5 hours is a full day of work???  Oh man, reading this was like college senior Val reaching through time to slap present Val in the face with her lethargy and moochiness!  And can I just say that I went through the rest of the year largely mooching off the freshies in my small group for debits.  ;)  ahh, those were the days.

Nashville

Last Saturday, I said goodbye to beautiful Madison and set out for the great wide unknown. Tim Johnson (my new/old subaru legacy) made the trip beautifully! I met up with a friend from Samaritan's Purse in New Johnsonville, TN before making my way into Nashville itself. We had some good gab time, went to church and then to a bbq place before I left. Then I met up with Janna, an IV staff that I met through the last intern to come to 2100.

So, I decided to stay at 2100 an extra month than I had originally planned. This meant that I stayed after the summer interns left, which was sad, but I also got to meet the fall intern that came in September. It so happens that he graduated from Vanderbilt, which is in Nashville!! So again, the Lord provided in a way I hadn't foreseen and answered my prayers for housing!

I'm living in west Nashville now, until I can find a job or freelance regularly enough to support myself.

So far things look pretty good on the freelance side of things, I'm learning a lot about the city and growing to love it the more I see of it! There is a lot of need and a lot of christian complacency here. Nashville has the most churches per capita than any other city in the nation. It's an interesting dynamic with all the refugees, poor, and prostitution that is present here. More on that later.

All of my work from my internship is up on my website now, so take a peek if you've got the notion!

Drumroll, please!

The piece I've been actively working on since the start of my internship in March was FINALLY completed today!!!!

Check it out here!

Hipsters

There was a recent article in Christianity Today that has the office (especially the 2100 studio peeps) all in a tizzy about "hipster faith" and what that's all about. At first, I was content just to be really amused at all the old people trying to understand hipsters. There's a list of authors, directors, and music that hipsters supposedly like at the bottom of the article in the actual magazine, and it got passed around so everyone in 2100 could put their own symbol next to the ones they liked. We need to ferret out the hipster christians among us, apparently (yes, I am one, according to my office mates and this article. heck, I'm wearing a superfluous scarf right now!). So I finally actually read the article, and it made me laugh and also made me a little angry. At first, it sounded to me like someone at NPR reporting on my generation as a whole, and of course I didn't like that! What kind of "millennial" would I be if I did? But it turns out that the same guy wrote an article for Relevant magazine that sort of made me like both articles. See if you agree.

But the thing is, neither article is really written to the people it's written about, who I think are the college or post-college aged christians who are filling the churches he's referring to. They're in Christian magazines, which I'm pretty sure were among the first Christian-y things to be thrown out by the new "hipster christian" generation, as defined by Mr. McCracken. This alone is what amused me when I first heard about (and appropriately didn't bother reading) the article.

Maybe Relevant might have a larger readership. I know I wouldn't have been caught dead with a copy when I was in HS, but I saw the demographic who might when I was at"LiFest," the huge christian music concert/conference thing they have in Wisconsin. (us interns got free tickets! I saw Newsboys and Skillet! yeah.....) Basically, lots of high schoolers in skinny jeans, plaid, and tats.

Yeah, so a friend in the office (a fellow hipster, you might say) and I have been talking about this at length. I'm not sure why "hipsterism" is such a big deal to folks right about now, other than the older generation might not understand it, but the articles made me look at how and why I do what I do when it comes to the church and my own faith. For me, I take it kind of as a warning not to take myself too seriously, not to cling to my "cool" factor, and not to outright reject things like contact evangelism and praying for random people on the bus. I really don't care if I'm a hipster or not, but I do have a tendency to let my personal image or what people might think of me get in the way of obedience to God.

Interesting stuff.

love of my life!

I just spent the evening having long conversations with the love of my life... a five year old named Zeke. Seriously, this kid is awesome. We talked about dinosaurs, the moon, and the world that everyone has in their nose, called "Nose World."

new site!

I'm in the process of building valerietracy.com, my freelance website, and it has a built in blog! So I'll be posting all of my sketches there from now on! :) I put a few of my old favorites up there for now.

Baseball slang

So, every year at my office everyone decorates according to a theme for the new staff tour. This year's theme is Baseball, so my coworker decided to have the communications department decorate by illustrating Baseball slang visually! Some of the slang, like "can of corn," "high cheese," and "golden sombrero" (look them up. it's ok, I had to as well) are visual puns that we'll have physically represented in the office, but others will go on posters. These are a few that I did:

Some Finished Videos

About a month ago, I was a part of a film crew sent to document the Price of Life campaign at the Ohio State University. The completed projects have been put up on vimeo! Check them out:
Time-lapse documentation of the mid-week edit we did on site (unprecedented in 2100 history!):
http://vimeo.com/11935285

mid-week edit:
http://vimeo.com/11135330

Full-Length final edit:
http://vimeo.com/11820743

Enjoy!

storyboarding!

a rough mock-up of some storyboards I've been working on.

::edit:: now they're bigger!

best monday morning ever

I stroll into work today, passing my little mail slot on the way to my cubicle. Nothing there, which is sort of unusual after a long weekend. I'm dissapointed in passing, but by the time I get to my cube I'm over it.

THEN I approach to see a sizable package sitting on my desk!! Filled with Phillies stuff. and candy. and tastykakes. and other native-to-the-philly-area awesomeness!! Now, had I gotten this on Saturday (after a painful Phillies loss to the Mets), it still would have been awesome, but not as awesome as getting it TODAY, after our 11-5, and subsequent series, win. A win which was sweetened by finally getting my laptop to stream the commentary from the am 1470, the sports radio station in Allentown, and not just having to read about it the next day!

So, basically my Auntie Bean is awesome.

So are tastykakes.

a few recent(ish) sketches

TV personality

Nature

Fun at Work

Since my last post, I have been back to Atlanta to do another week of work with Samaritan's purse. I have also lost those mittens in my second-to-last post. I've moved to Wisconsin. I've started a new job.

I've also drawn some more, but I can't scan things out here yet! Man, it's not like I'm exactly technologically inept. I scored a whole 6% on the Geek Test! I should be able to work the fancy technology here at work.

So, my first week of work consisted of meetings. A lot of them. Also workshops! Like, how to light an interview! and How to use a fancy camera! My schedule was basically hour-to-hour. completely full.

My second week has been quite the empty slate, however. I have watched more animations than I care to admit on vimeo, spent hours drawing on scrap paper, and brainstorming for an epic sea-voyage animation to show how awesome it is to be a missionary! ...that might not get used. Our clients get to pick which idea they like best out of 3. the sea-monster one was my idea. Anyhow, all of this is in the name of creative development!! I can do basically anything I want that's "artistic" and it counts as work! I'm really looking forward to having more tangible projects to work on though, there's only so much brainstorming I can do for a project without overthinking it. And I'm only working on two projects at this point.

Also, my car died. and so did my brother's car. the brakes actually went out on that one, while I was driving on a pretty major road.

Also, I saw a dorney park mug at work today, and had a weird moment where I forgot where I was. Turns out the owner of the mug knows people from PA? but was never there herself. sigh. although I have met a few girls from Philly and Pittsburgh! neither are phillies fans, tho. sigh.